AppNeta

Appneta, an application performance monitoring company (or APM), enables businesses to monitor the apps they use and develop as well as the networks those apps are built upon. As the Marketing team shifted some of their focus, AppNeta used Bambu by Sprout Social to harness its employee’s social connections, boost social reach and acquire new customers.

Identifying a Business Case

AppNeta had been focusing its customer acquisition efforts on outbound sales channels with less attention to inbound marketing. After identifying that gap, the Marketing team decided to double down on inbound efforts by growing AppNeta’s social media footprint, specifically on Twitter and LinkedIn, in hopes of acquiring a broad base of new customers. To do so, the group turned to its own employee base to spearhead their strategy.

Overcoming Initial Concerns

AppNeta is made up of over 150 employees that are proud of the company they work for. However, when asked to promote their workplace on social, there were some initial concerns. When it came to sharing company content on their personal profiles, there was some initial skepticism and confusion.

Employees had the following questions for AppNeta’s Marketing department:

Is the content I’m being asked to share approved by senior leadership?

Are there any rules or regulations surrounding the content that I’m sharing?

What’s in it for me?

How can I contribute?

In short, people were confused about what and how they should share company content. AppNeta’s Cheif Marketing Officer, Damian Roskill, was charged with answering his colleagues questions and proving the worth and benefits of employee advocacy.

Proving Value & Securing Buy-In

Before investing in a technology solution to support its advocacy efforts, AppNeta needed to get its employees comfortable participating and prove to senior leadership that a formal program would offer value. The Marketing team did this with an internal email program in which they sent out company press releases, blog posts and Tweets with suggested social messaging that employees could draft and share on their personal social media networks.

Employees were responsive and liked the content. AppNeta’s advocacy efforts were proving to be successful. But the team quickly realized that their email blasts would only accomplish so much. In order to deploy a formal advocacy program that engaged their entire organization, they needed a software that would allow them to scale and measure their efforts.

Setting Goals

Stemming from the success and key learnings of its email test program, AppNeta focused its advocacy program on getting employees activated and showing early success metrics.

AppNeta’s goals for its employee advocacy program were to:

Obtain 60% employee participation.

Provide employees an easy method to share content.

Leverage contributions from inside the company.

Investing in an Advocacy Platform

Bambu provided the Marketing team with a streamlined tool that made these goals achievable. In 3 months, AppNeta’s employee advocacy program boosted the company’s inbound marketing efforts and increased the brand’s overall social footprint.

1. Ease of Use

It was crucial that employee adoption succeeded and scaled. With more than 150 employees across the organization, spanning multiple departments (Sales, Finance, Customer Success & Recruiting, etc.), it was important that people were able to jump right in and instantly know what they were doing.

The people that wanted to contribute, now feel like they have a channel to contribute and feel like they’re contributing value to the company, empowered to participate and know what’s going on internally.

Damian Roskill
Chief Marketing Officer at AppNeta

Bambu made that adoption process easy because it provided a centralized platform for employees to view all of AppNeta’s marketing content and share content with a click of their mouse.

2. Role Differentiation

Onboarding ~150 people into Bambu naturally meant that there were going to be varying levels of social media expertise among users. This is why the platform’s curator roles were essential to the advocacy program’s success. User permissions within Bambu help distinguish content curators from general accounts.

This functionality empowered ~12 members of AppNeta’s Marketing team by giving the ability to collect and distribute high-quality content to their organization without having to worry. Bambu’s story curation tools let AppNeta’s curators customize messages based on social network and target content to different, internal functions. This helped the team provide personalized, relevant content to the right audiences within their company and increased the probability of participation and sharing.

3. Analytics

It’s incredibly important to be able to easily report on any digital marketing activities within your organization. This was no different for AppNeta. Proving the value and success of their new employee advocacy program internally was crucial to the lifespan of the program. Bambu provided a solution that easily gave insights into social amplification and top advocates within the organization.

I’ve got more than 60% of my company engaged in this endeavor.

Damian Roskill
Chief Marketing Officer at AppNeta

Legitimizing the Program

With the help of Bambu, AppNeta has grown their social footprint successfully while simultaneously creating a more informed and engaged workforce.

Since launching its program in April 2016, AppNeta has:

Seen a 3x growth in Twitter impressions

Experience a 45x spike in LinkedIn impressions

Actively engaged 60% of all employees

Next Steps

Coming off a successful launch, AppNeta plans to continue to optimize and grow its employee advocacy program. In Q3 and Q4 of 2016, Roskill and his team hopes to use Bambu to:

Drive 300,000 impressions per month

Promote success internally to actively onboard inactive users

Curate new and different types of content (e.g. internal / non shareable stories)